Topical Tropes

These are what we call the 'YMMV items.' Things that some people find in this work. We call them 'your mileage might vary' because not everyone sees these things in the same way. This starts discussions in the trope lists, a thing we don't want. Please use the discussion page if you'd like to discuss any of these items.

Almost nobody in the game regrets their own death after they die — it seems to be a property of the realm of the dead (or maybe just the fact that, well, they still exist, so much of the fear is gone. But Sissel explicitly notes that he's not worried even when he's told that he'll disappear at dawn). Those people who express regret always express it over their inability to protect others, not themselves.

Kamila. An assassin bursts into her apartment? Dad's in jail for the murder of her mother? Mother is dead and she thinks it's all her fault? Crushed to death by a gigantic stone monument and then brought back to life? Kidnapped, shoved into a suitcase, and dragged back to the house where her mother was shot to death in front of her? Trapped in a sinking submarine with death imminent? No biggie, who needs counselling? Hey, Lynne, how does spaghetti sound for dinner?

Draco in Leather Pants: Yomiel. After his Heel-Face Turn he is given a tragic backstory and is portrayed as fully sympathetic, the last image of the game being a Tear Jerker image of him. He expresses regret for taking Lynne hostage and he loves his cat, sure, but lest we forget some of the sympathetic things he did: he murders a 5 year old girl's mother in front of her and makes her think she did it, he possesses a 10 year old girl and tries to make her kill her own father, he actually succeeds in cold-bloodedly killing her in her own apartment as we see in the alternate timeline. And this is just what he does to Kamila! What's more, he shows no remorse until he's been stabbed in the back. Yet he's one of the most popular characters.

He says himself that the loneliness corrupted him and that he had more or less lost his marbles, he's sympathetic because his pain caused him to do those things after Lynne reaches out to him he snaps back and works to fix what he did.

Contributing to this perception may be the fact that he has the appearance of the protagonist, who we've spent the entire game with and become sympathetic to. So even knowing he's not the same person, he still looks like the character you've been playing and connecting to for 15+ chapters now.

Also, even if you don't buy into the redemption, it's hard not to wince a bit in sympathy when watching him get crunched by the Mino statue after he manipulates himself to throw Lynne out of the way. Ouch.

Yomiel still being redeemed, despite everyting is part of what makes the ending so amazing, IMO. Keep in mind that without his help the happy ending would have been impossible, and he did not expect to survive an encounter with Mino in the first place.

Guide Dang It: Some of the puzzles can come across as this if you have a particularly difficult time with them:

The Justice Minister's heart attack - You initially have way too little time to secure his medicine despite being able to attempt to do so anyway. You must secure the water first AND you have to make it up to the fan in the brief window of time when you are able to in order to ultimately retrieve the medicine.

Saving the Professor from Yomiel's explosion - You can't do anything useful without Missile. And you have a very short window of time to obtain him. What makes it particularly bad is that you don't recover Missile by moving over to him, instead you have to use the camera to locate him during a brief window of opportunity, a mechanic that doesn't appear in any other puzzle in the entire game. Even then, you have to figure out how to move the circular trash can lid under the trapdoor and wait until it flattens out to the same shape as the rectangular trapdoor, leading to a very bizarre and No Fourth Wall usage of Missile's shape swapping power.

The bullet swap for Cabanela. You have to somehow figure out that you need to: drop a hard hat while Yomiel is not looking, let Yomiel get shot and come back, ride the cart over and drop a knit hat, ride the cart back with the hat on top of it, and use Missile to swap the book and the now flattened hat. It is perhaps the most dramatic shape and position change for any object in the entire game, and you might not even be aware of the bullet's shape to perform the swap with until you've already succeeded (or attempted a swap with the hard hat in its initial position instead).

Karma Houdini: Sith, considering he betrays Yomiel, orders assassinations of main characters, and probably intends to do some horrible things with the Temsik meteorite fragment. Nothing bad happens to him in any timeline.

Yomiel himself might count as well. Despite being shown as somewhat sympathetic and redeemable towards the end, he's still done lots of horrible things out a twisted sense of desiring "revenge". Ultimately he gets the normal life he wanted, has a fiancee again, and only has to spend ten years in jail before being a free man. YMMV depending on how much you think his Freudian Excuse is responsible for his actions, or whether his evil actions still count since the new timeline undid them all.

Moral Event Horizon: Commander Sith backstabs Yomiel by tricking his spirit into leaving his body for another part of the sub, removing the Temsik meteorite, and sinking the sub. This would condemn Yomiel to an eternity in crushing darkness, completely alone without even a body to move with. And his only reasoning is that he outlived his usefulness. Since we feel a little sorry for Yomiel by this point, it doesn't feel like karmic justice.

Narm Charm: The game constantly plays the line between silly and dramatic, but at the end, Missile-Prime says that he protected Lynne over a ten year period because "That's what doggies do!" It easily could be Narm, but it ends up as a Heartwarming Moment.

Refuge in Audacity: Some players may view the various twists near the end of the game as just stupid story writing. Others can view it as being intentionally absurd for the humor value. Ray is a particularly good example, as the description of his motivations and your part in his goals comes across as very But Wait, There's More! each time he adds some information. Take Silent Hill 2's dog ending as a starting point and treat it as canonical rather than silly and you basically have Ghost Trick's ending.

Rewatch Bonus: The game definitely warrants a replay once you learn that Sissel is a cat.

Squick: The toilet pipe system that is used by some prisoners to communicate with each other is a brilliant idea. Then again, they must also use and flush their toilets after more... mundane acts, and the bell of the receiver prisoner presumably jingles then too...

The prison break is infuriating. It's carried out in near-darkness (unless you're in the ghost world, where time stands still) and is both a stealth and escort mission, made doubly annoying due to the fact that it portrays a three-dimensional cutaway of the building in a two-dimensional perspective. It's hard to know, in one area, that you need to have Jowd hide behind the stairs because you can't even tell that area is accessible. If you don't know that Jowd can hide behind the stairs, try figuring out without a guide that Jowd isn't supposed to go up the stairs normally, but has to jump up and go through a grate that one of the guards would be hiding in had you not opened it and made him fall by this point.

Even worse is the heart attack level, notably the one time in the game where you can pass a checkpoint after the situation becomes unwinnable, forcing you to start from the beginning.

Chapter 9 tops it with the escape sequence. An instant-fail stealth sequence in a puzzle game. And those ''stairs//...

Chapter 10 wins the record for forcing the most restarts, including at least one where you have to erase a checkpoint.

Chapter 14's umbrella has stumped many people.

Made even worse by the fact that the hint that you get when you miss the critical point (namely when the park guardian jumps upon the seesaw) is misleading; it implies you have to stop him from running, which you couldn't really do. You do have to delay him, but it doesn't have anything to do with making him stop running.

Chapter 15, made more complicated by the presence of the Manipulator.

The last two entries in Guide Dang It are from this chapter alone. That alone should say something about how hard this chapter is.

The underlying animation is incredibly good, which is to say the character models and movements are fantastic. However, their translation into a few pixels on a DS screen doesn't do the animation anywhere near the amount of justice it deserves.

In other words, it looks great in motion, but makes for awful magazine screenshots. A very common thing with DS games.

The Temsik meteorite, when we finally see it fall in the final chapter.Spectacular.

The Woobie: It's impossible not to feel for Kamila considering all she goes through.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy